The Cooler King (part 2)

It’s about managing expectations!

and a tour inside ‘The Cooler’

My commissioner is again asking about the installment of the mosaics completed so far?

My next client has programmed a large series of workshops for me very soon.

And a returning client has raised money for second project and wants to start work on a fairly large mosaic for completion by the end of the financial year.

It’s all about managing expectations and negotiating extended deadlines but at the same time doing the urgent non movable stuff. Its alot of balls in the air and I’m going to drop a few.

Be interesting to see how many blog posts appear here next month?….

In the mean time while I procrastinate from accounting and ledger work, I thought a view inside ‘The Cooler’ would be an interesting distraction.

Changing Priorities

Yellow Wagtail and a Song Thrush done and Whitelands Farm is finished. I have other things to do now and the fourth mosaic will not be my next task.

But I thought I would write a detailed description here of the ideas behind the mosaic, something I should maybe have done for the previous two mosaics as well.

So here goes:

The overall theme running through all seven mosaics is that they were inspired by the ecological report written for the developer of the site, and generally focus on the animals found there. The second consistant feature is they are all maps (exept one). Whitelands Farm is really the only development ever to have happened on the site in recent times. I found drawings in the local records office showing the farm buildings in 1897 and more buildings being added in 1921. The centre of the mosaic is a layout of the farm buildings in 1921-23. I have depicted animals and plants mentioned in the report as having occupied the site prior to the developing building works. The design uses text as well to list a couple of other species found there. The outer ring of text lists previous human activity on the farm site, which includes ancient burial mounds which I understand will be covered with soil and be in the school field. Finally each corner shows a bird mentioned in the report as the type of bird found on the farm.

So my next tasks are ever such a lot of accounting, preparations for a project in Southampton, a meeting in london about changing plans for a mosaic in Nunhead. And the other thing I really have to do is the painted map of The Wildart Trail.

My drawings for the interpretation panels on this woodland trail have been installed and this has prompted the finishing of this final piece of work. It is a map of the trail created by the visitors to the woods on a woodlandland festival day. I started it on the day but have been unable to finish it……Now I have to finish it as it is the last piece of the whole Blean Project Programme which is coming to an end.

The trouble is my head is so somewhere else, and my mind scrambled with other stuff. I look at it and it reminds me of a Breugal painting called ‘Childrens Games’ which has the entire picture covered in small isolated details. The members of the public who painted the images on each did something where there was a bit of available space to create this woodland map.

I have to get to grips with this somehow? And I love painting and so rarely do any…..but this is a corker.

All I can say is…… paint is a much more flexible medium than mosaic, so whats your problem num-nuts? GET ON WITH IT!

Shared Space:

That’s what this project started as…… ‘Shared Space’…. is a zone where cars, buses, people, bikes, vans and skateboards even, are all equal. I was so excited and thought what a fantastic progressive thing to have on your CV. The only model I knew at the time was Ashford in Kent but subsequently Kensington in London where the Museums are

see slide show here

http://www.flickr.com//photos/73419983@N05/sets/72…

has fairly recently been transformed into a Shared Space. I know I mentioned somewhere before that the plans for this were not agreed by the Town Council, though the District Council were very keen and commissioned me to draw up designs for the streetscape. Sadly not to be and a road with pavements in the tradional is the reality.

So I had visited Ashford to have a look at this ‘Shared Space’ to see what it was like, and I didn’t think it was as scary as it sounded and every one took to it pretty easily. If you don’t know its there cos you never been to Ashford before, it seems to be introduced by art lampposts and a general feel of the place being different as the surface of the road changes. I can’t remember if speed humps introduce it or not.

Now I just spent a few days in Amsterdam where the whole city centre is a kind of ‘Shared Space’…truly amazing to see the motor car at the bottom of the pecking order…a totally pointless way getting around.

I didn’t see a speed sign,

didn’t see a roundabout

or traffic lights

or many road markings painted on the road,

didn’t see many signs at all.

I did not see a single cyclist wearing a helmet though I saw tens of thousands of cyclists.

Apparently over 500,000 bikes in the city centre with an estimated 30,000 bikes at the bottom of the canal system.

Moped drivers don’t need helmets either, though motor-bikes do.

I saw what might be described as ‘near misses’ in the UK between cyclists and pedestrians going on constantly as routine road behaviour. A near miss in Amsterdam then ….lets say about 2inches …..and six inches is plenty of room. I never saw a crash or heard an accident.

I think we need to get a grip over here, the car driver as top dog needs challenging. I know we have pedestrian shopping zones, but this is different as all users are equall. I don’t know what it is like where you live? But cyclists are still relatively rare road users. Cycling does have a slightly higher profile, but helmets, elbow pads and day glow jackets, lights flashing…….all seems rather over the top in comparison to Amsterdam. Had the shared space on my project happened I would have liked to have organised a pop up ‘Free Running’ performance in the zone to promote it…

For now then I am back to cracking rocks again.

two more birds and then its three done four mosaics to go…..not even half way yet. It’s tough to get going again, its such an emotional investment creating a large work like this. My stamina is already being well tested.

Still Life.

Whitelands Farm then…seems to be going so slow. Finished a mouse and struggled with the corn, kept changing my mind on how to make corn and in the end settled for each grain being made of four tiles instead of two. Once a system is in place then things speed right up and progress is quicker. Doing fields at the moment and again a colour system is needed for each area.

It’s not like paint I can’t just add a bit of yellow to get the right colour. It’s all about mixing colours optically on the paper to achieve an overall effect …….a blend from a distance….can be really tricky.

While I was doing the farm buildings and the edges of the fields in this mosaic I remembered seeing several public footpath signs leading across fields and several farms between where I live and the woodlands a couple of miles away. So I have this morning I spent a couple of hours or more traversing these public footpaths on my bike around these farms. Every time I saw footpath sign I went along it. There turned out to be so many different paths I didn’t even reach the woods. The signs for these paths sometimes just disappear leaving you to ride where you think it might be!….Found myself riding through sheep, horses, horse jumps, past rusty machinery cows and lifted my bike over countless gates, just totally lost in muddy farms for ages and ages. And never once was accosted for trespassing, which I felt was amazing. I did see one bloke carrying a plastic bag walking towards me and wondered if he was going to shout ‘ GET OFF MY LAND’. As I passed him it turned out he was carrying a muddy car battery in the other hand and said ‘Morning’ quite friendly.

So I got a feel for fields surrounding farms alright which is what my next mosaic task is!

And I would also like to say that I heard Grayson Perry mention on the radio the other day that ‘pottery’ played second fiddle to other art forms, which was one of the reasons that drew him to pottery and made him want to work in that medium. Well…….I used to paint ‘still lifes’ when I was at school and loved doing them, really loved them, choosing the objects and arranging them and everything, even a view out of the window in the background, lost in a world of things I liked. But when I went to collage I was made to feel this was an inferior way of working, and what I really aught to be doing was some proper macho, expressionist, action paintings about plasticity and get to grips with proper painting issues….even epic history painting was better than STILL LIFE.…move on. Unlike Grayson Perry I believed this advise to be true and left still life alone ….

I shall be in Amsterdam for a few days on holiday next week and might re-acquaint my relationship with the ‘still life’ after all these years apart.

Glue Making and a look inside the Cooler.

The glue I use to stick the tiles to the paper is made from plain flour and water. This was begining to break down and go a little runny for my liking ….not mouldy yet, just a little runny. So I decided to put it back in the sausepan and add a little more flour to thicken it up.

I like the paste quite thick so the tiles are able to slide on top of the glue while it is still wet. this makes arranging them much easier, so thick paste is favourite.

So I popped it back in the pan and thickened it up added a bit more salt as a preservative to delay it going mouldy, and simmered it untill it went like boiling mud in Yellowstone National Park….lovely. Back in my jar and back to work.

Now I thought as there is less water content in the glue it would also dry quicker as the temperature is generally going down and getting cooler, now autumn is setting in, so a thick paste would dry quicker with less moisture in, also advantageous as the reduced moisture does not buckle the kraft paper so much either. It can be pain trying to lay very small tiles on buckled paper (like tiny boats in very rough seas, with troughs of highs and lows).

Now I been in my workshop this morning and the glue has not dried over night, but when it was runny it dried much quicker! eh..dont get that.

But no matter…. I might add a little water to it as it is so thick I had difficulty getting it off the brush and onto the paper into those little nooks and crannys. So its a trade off then between optimun slideability and brushability. Fine adjustment required for maximum glue performance properties.

I made a daisy yesterday and I painted diaseys on my first ever piece of public art back in 1989 in Deptford. I have not put daiseys in everything since, but I have painted many on murals over the years and it has become almost a signature but not quite….I like them though. The days eye which opens all day and shuts at night time.